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The White House, from Kennedy to Obama

Washington — It is 10:15 on election night and a day of light rain has given way to light traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. The traffic is diverted around the heavily fortified pedestrian walkway from which I am gazing through the old wrought-iron fence at the White House. Ohio has just been called for Obama, assuring the country's selection of the next occupant. He will be the eighth man to occupy this house since I arrived here to follow the fanfare and foibles of this most unusual town on New Year's Day 1963. Kennedy through Obama.

Anyone who has survived here that long has more than a few odd tales to tell about the house and its occupants. Most are sad or poignant. This is not a place that brings universal pleasure.

I'm a loner, unusual for a reporter. I like to go where others don't. Purposely usually. Sometimes it just happens. The day the first president I covered was murdered—I had traveled with him through the west six weeks earlier but not to Dallas—I watched on television from the Press Club bar as his successor arrived with the casket and the widow at Andrews Air Force base.

It simply seemed natural to sprint the four blocks to the house I am looking at now. The press room in the old West Wing was configured differently then, a warren of tiny cubicles equipped with Underwoods and an occasional stylish Olivetti. It adjoined a small reception room that connected to the Oval Office by a door, a short hallway, a staff office, and then the President's door.

I rushed in to find myself eerily alone—the feel of a twilight zone—with no attendant at the reception desk and not a soul in either room. The floor was strewn with the detritus of the day's crumpled newspapers and not-quite-yesterday's awful news. One front page still haunts, the cover of Washington's old and last tabloid, The Daily News, filled with dark tabloid simplicity: JFK IS SLAIN. Smudged into the page was the imprint of a reporter's gumshoe rubber footprint.

In moments I heard the shuffle of a group approaching in a hallway entering from the east. Thinking they were correspondents from the plane, I blundered in to find the huge figure of L.B.J. bearing down like a freight train with his Secret Service detail in tow behind him. His eyes froze on me with an understandably strange curiosity. I mumbled, "Mr. President," pasted myself to the wall, and the group swept past, quickly gone into what was now Lyndon B. Johnson's Oval Office.

A decade later, after more confrontational White House moments with Johnson's successor, I found myself on my third president's "enemies list." Although the White House enemies list seems almost quaint now compared to the intimidations and infringements of rights in recent years, I was genuinely furious about the "get ya" implications that went with it. I didn't need the whole government on my back. My buddies pumped me on the back and said, "Lighten up, Proch, he has cooked his own goose and given you a journalistic badge of courage." Probably. Or maybe my first wife was right. She didn't speak about it until years after we were divorced. "I was afraid," she said. "I was afraid the rest of the time."

Nixon did do me the favor of resigning on my birthday a year later. Two years after that, when I turned 40, I visited his Elba in the walled seaside compound at San Clemente. No chance of seeing him or anyone, of course. I was a strong ocean swimmer then, so I headed for the beach where Nixon often walked alone, always in his wingtips. I swam far out beyond the surf where I could see over the wall, floated on my back for an hour, and watched them as they intently watched me. It was the most satisfying part of the experience.

Four more presidents and now another coming. No matter what your politics, when you look at the group I have had so far, giving grace to the would-be prince with his damnable assassination and the man riding in soon on an historic tide and with such remarkable promise, I have to say mine have been a pretty motley crew: the second forced to retire, the next forced to resign, followed by two so forgettable they will strain the memories of generations of schoolchildren, a hero out of Hollywood sadly edging into senility as he left, his one-term successor memorable mostly for founding a dynasty that would implode, then a man impeached, albeit in one of the most scatter-brained acts in the history of the democracy.

And the man upstairs tonight, who seems locked in his own Elba in the White House, a place he clearly hates, for 11 more weeks. No point in trying to go in tonight, as I did years ago. Nothing there for anyone except a tragedy. Can't be sure the man is even fully aware of it. Can't forgive him for taking all of us with him.

Seven hundred miles away more than 125,000 people are awaiting Barack Obama's acceptance. In front of George W.'s White House, on a two-block public sidewalk facing a treasured house on an historic night, I can count only four other people. It is almost as eerie as the first time.